A town rises from the ashes

One year later, new homes under construction can be seen from the spot where the wildfire jumped Highway 88 to burn down homes in southeast part of Slave Lake.Rick MacWilliam
/ edmontonjournal.com

This overall photo of southeast Slave Lake shows houses that have been built to replace the ones lost to the wildfire.Rick MacWilliam
/ edmontonjournal.com

Slave Lake fire Chief Jamie Coutts at the place where the Slave Lake wildfire started last spring.Rick MacWilliam
/ edmontonjournal.com

Yolande and Dion Klyne sit the front room of their under-construction house. Go to edmontonjournal.com/slavelake to hear the Klynes discuss the emotions of the last year.Rick MacWilliam
/ edmontonjournal.com

Frank Ward sits on the deck of his home, which was spared by the wildfire and is now in the middle of a busy construction zone.Rick MacWilliam

SLAVE LAKE — They rise up from the dirt and clay, tall new houses with vaulted roofs and big, wide windows. Blue and red and brown and white, with crisp trim and fresh grey shingles, with wooden decks and stairs hanging off the sides, unfinished.

In the middle of one street, a tree reaches its skeletal black branches into a pale blue sky.

It’s been one year.

Walking his dog amid construction trucks and empty lots, an oilfield worker thinks about how much his family used to have, and wonders whether it was too much. Down the street, two little boys dig in the dirt with sticks, as their parents look ahead to the house that will be built there this summer.

A year has passed, but the fire chief still spends most nights lying awake, thinking about what happened, and what could happen next. And most people in town get nervous when they feel a warm, dry wind blowing in from the forest.

In a temporary trailer on the outskirts of town, a little girl starts to cry when smoke from a neighbour’s bonfire drifts into her bedroom.

“Mom,” she says. “That smell.”

The fire that burned Slave Lake started in an unremarkable area of bush and trees along a rutted clay road, eight kilometres out of town and not far from the highway. The forest was already burning hot and fast by the time Slave Lake fire chief Jamie Coutts and his crew of volunteer firefighters pulled up early on the evening of May 14, the blaze moving like crazy through the spruce trees, driven by what Coutts calls a “blow-your-hair-straight-back” wind. The fire was so hot the long grass was bursting into flame across the road, and Coutts called to get the water going fast.

They fought the fire there for a while, but with the blaze so hot and hungry, and with the winds so high, the firefighters soon focused on saving houses in the nearby hamlet of Mitsue.

With the fire racing toward the community, Coutts didn’t have to tell the residents to leave. When he pointed at the wall of smoke moving toward them, people grabbed what they could and ran for their vehicles.

Ten houses burned in Mitsue that night, while fire crews fought unsuccessfully to get the blaze under control. In the bush, the fire continued to grow and spread, moving toward the town of Slave Lake. Knowing the fire was close, some residents prepared to evacuate, but they relaxed when it seemed certain the fire would burn around the town.

On Sunday morning, Dion and Yolande Klyne unpacked some of the pictures and mementos they had moved into their trailer, and took everything back inside the house.

On Sunday afternoon, the wind shifted, and everything changed.

Nearly a year later, Coutts stands on that same rutted road, staring out at the patch of burned forest. The evidence markers that once dotted the area are gone, and new sprouts of green poke out among the blackened trees and charred logs.

“I don’t come here that much,” Coutts says. “You think back of what it was like. This is where it all started.”

Slave Lake is a town accustomed to fire. Nestled within the dense boreal forest, wildfires have come close to the town many times, burning paths through the thick bush that runs through the area, sometimes licking around the edges of the community but never coming inside.

“It almost sounds stupid now, but we didn’t really think this could happen,” says Cara Davies, one of the 732 people who lost their homes in the fire.

“We never thought the town could burn down. How could a whole town burn?”

Even for Coutts and the other firefighters, what happened last May was far beyond anything they had ever imagined in their emergency planning sessions, a firestorm much worse than their worst-case scenarios.

“This was always a ‘defend in place’ community,” says Coutts, 38. “Keep the people in the community and keep the fire out. That’s how you do it ... For the 60-plus years that the town has been here, we could always do that.”

But things changed on May 15, 2011, between 3:30 and 4 p.m. In that half-hour period, the wind shifted 15 degrees and a blanket of thick black smoke turned day into night. The wind picked up chunks of burning wood and pine needles from the forest and whipped the embers into town, sending fireballs raining from the sky onto roofs and lawns, onto the trucks and cars of panicked residents trying desperately to get out of town.

At his Ford dealership on main street, Doug Babiy heard a series of small explosions and knew the fire was inside Slave Lake.

The fire was relentless and unpredictable. Whole blocks were reduced to nothing but ash, while other areas remained untouched.

Voracious and random, the fire burned half a tree but left the leaves green on the other side.

It reduced cars and boats to frames and puddles of molten metal, but left a wooden lawn ornament intact.

As the fire raged, an RCMP officer who was directing traffic had his hair singed off. One firefighter’s hat melted.

Mark Missal, a town councillor who was in the air directing water bombers for Sustainable Resource Development, watched as large sections of his town burned to the ground.

“It looked like hell,” he says. “It was so smoky you couldn’t really see the flames until it got dark.”

Mayor Karina Pillay-Kinnee was at the town office when the fire tore into the community.

“I remember the shock and terror on people’s faces,” she says. “I could hear someone crying and breaking down. To me, I was like, wow, this is really happening.”

“Look,” Yolande Klyne says, pulling the charred, broken head of a golf club from a mound of dirt in front of her new house.

Yolande and her husband, Dion, examine the clubhead for a moment, then chuck it onto a small pile of rusted metal debris at the edge of their yard.

The wreckage of burned houses was long ago dug up and carted away, but the ground is littered with shards of broken dishes and smashed tiles, pieces of rusted metal, and melted glass.

“They tried to dig it up, ” Dion says. “But there’s no way they could get it all.”

The Klynes’ house is in the southeast area of Slave Lake, on the edge of a neighbourhood that was almost levelled. Two homes on their street survived without damage. The Klynes lost everything.

Almost a year later, after countless hours of dealing with insurance agents, builders, and municipal officials, the Klynes’ new home is close to being finished. Like many of the rebuilt houses, it is bigger than the one that burned, and Yolande and Dion have added some special features for themselves and their children.

They are excited about their new house, but Yolande feels anxious sometimes, and still can’t imagine what it will be like to move in, to spend their first night there.

Walking along the unfinished plywood floors, she tries to imagine her daughter having sleepovers in her mauve bedroom with the sparkly chandelier, the girls awake and giggling all night. Downstairs, Yolande pictures her son, years in the future, packing boxes and getting ready to go away to university.

“I just get this flood of images of the future, and it kind of reassures me that it will one day feel like home,” she says. “You look around and think, ‘Oh, we’ve got to start all over.’ My kids are 11 and 13, do I start putting them against the wall and measuring their heights again?”

With the loss of more than 500 homes and businesses, as well as vehicles, campers, and town infrastructure, losses from the fire now sit at $742 million. The Slave Lake fire is the second biggest insurable disaster in Canadian history, after the 1998 ice storm in Quebec and Ontario.

Frank Ward, whose modest bungalow was one of the only houses on his block to survive the fire, looks out at the dozens of brand new homes cropping up around him.

He says he can’t believe how quickly the area is being rebuilt, and how different it all looks.

“One of my friends said to me, ‘Your home should have burned, too, and you’d have a bigger one now,’ ” he says. “But I told him, ‘No, if it burned then I would have no home, because I had no insurance.’ ”

More than half of the buildings destroyed last May are somewhere in the process of being rebuilt.

Work on the town office and library is well underway, and that building is slated to be fully open by the summer of 2013.

Six apartment buildings are also being rebuilt, and there are some new rental developments in the works. Two churches that were destroyed are being rebuilt, and some of the burned businesses will reopen shortly.

Pillay-Kinnee says it’s incredible to have more than half the destroyed structures rebuilt within a year, and plans are moving ahead of schedule.

But for many residents the process has seemed slow and complex, an intricate puzzle requiring countless hours of work by town, municipal and government officials, emergency crews, and volunteer organizations like the Red Cross.

The scope of the rebuild is stunning: From disposing of 4,520 fridges and freezers filled with rotting food to repairing damaged infrastructure, and co-ordinating the simultaneous construction of hundreds of new buildings.

“It’s pretty tough going,” Pillay-Kinnee admits. “On the outside you see lots of building, but that takes a lot of hard work, dedication and stress. We’re focused and we’re moving forward, but there’s still a lot of emotion that goes with it.”

The feelings come up in strange and unexpected ways. Seeing an advertisement for community barbecues planned to commemorate the fire, Dion Klyne found himself upset in a way he didn’t expect, and doesn’t entirely understand.

“I was never emotional all the way along,” he says. “Now I feel like I’m all teary-eyed. I don’t even know why.”

Having worked in emergency services, Trevor and Cara Davies noticed when their four-year-old son, Misha, seemed to be struggling with his feelings after the fire.

Misha saw a counsellor and is doing better, but Cara says she can still see signs of trauma in her son. The family has been staying in student residences at Northern Lakes College, where Trevor teaches, but when their new house is built this summer, Misha wants his bedroom and all his toys to be exactly how they were before.

Cara said her sons talk about fire every day, and often pretend to be firemen.

Their house won’t be ready until the fall, and Cara admits it was bittersweet when friends were able to move into a new home a few weeks ago.

“We’re happy for them, but on the other hand it’s hard to see them getting on with their lives,” she says.

Yolande Klyne says people who didn’t lose their homes seem to sometimes feel uncomfortable around her, which she chalks up to “a survivor’s guilt thing they’re going through.”

She has also heard from people who think those who lost their homes have been given too much, including gifts and private concerts.

“They’ll say, ‘How come this is only benefiting people who lost their houses in the fire? We went through a trauma too,’ ” she says.

After the fire, some residents lashed out at officials, and the mayor and town councillors have been the target of criticism, anger and threats. Some, like town councillor Mark Missal, found themselves personally under attack while also dealing with the loss of their own homes.

“It was a huge challenge trying to provide leadership. People were under obvious stress, and it was very difficult,” Missal says. “But we just have to wipe that out and move forward. You just can’t look back.”

Realizing that the anniversary will be difficult for many, the town will commemorate the fire quietly, letting residents acknowledge it in their own ways. In addition to an official ceremony, free barbecue supplies are being offered so residents can mark the day with their own neighbourhood gatherings.

The theme of the anniversary is ‘One Year Stronger.’

“The emotional impacts of the disaster are still here, they’re still lingering and we’re still feeling it,” Pillay-Kinnee says. “It’s been mixed emotions in the community. Very mixed emotions.”

For 10 days after the fire, Slave Lake’s 7,000 residents crowded into evacuation centres, stayed with friends or family in other communities, booked into hotels, or lived in campers or tents outside the town. It was an anxious time, with residents desperate for news about exactly what had been lost, waiting to get back home and see the damage for themselves.

Inside the town, firefighters and emergency crews worked around the clock to douse fires still burning deep in the ground, to remove hazards, and to restore essential services so residents could safely return.

Those who were inside the town in those early days remember how the air was thick and toxic, how you could taste it in your mouth and at the back of your throat, how it would coat everything in a thin layer of acrid dust.

A month after the fire, Jamie Coutts went to the hospital because his breathing was so laboured he couldn’t walk up the stairs, and he had uncontrollable coughing fits.

“It got dark at 4:30 in the afternoon and I didn’t see the sun until the next day,” he says. “And every firefighter, and every person that stayed behind, every cop, every ambulance guy, every town person, it doesn’t matter who it was that stayed, we all had the exact same crap in our lungs.”

Firefighters and others who were inside the town after the fire have undergone batteries of blood tests, as well as CT scans and MRIs, to determine the extent of the damage caused by the toxic smoke. Results have showed thyroid problems in some people who were in the town during and immediately after the fire, and many continue to struggle with respiratory problems and coughing.

While the effects of toxic smoke is always a concern for firefighters, the extent of the exposure during the Slave Lake fires was extreme and prolonged. Coutts says his breathing has only recently started to get better, but he still sometimes coughs up black material from his lungs.

“At the end of the day I’ll probably die of cancer, and I will know what it was from,” he says. “That’s just how it is.”

Mark Missal remembers the smell of the fire, how it clung to everything, and how there were no birds or insects in burned areas for weeks afterward. “Just smoke, and lots of ash.”

He says the regime of vitamins and supplements provided to emergency workers seems to be helping.

At the time of the fire, Slave Lake had 61 volunteer firefighters, and two paid employees, including Coutts. There are now 80 volunteer firefighters in the region, and eight paid positions. Another 30 volunteer firefighters will soon be added in Mitsue.

At their regular Monday night practice, the firefighters break into two teams, one going to train with a new piece of sprinkler equipment, the other to do a controlled burn of grass beside the railway tracks.

Some Slave Lake firefighters have left the department since the fire, but there are new recruits, and others are more determined than ever to protect their community.

Firefighters have been working virtually non-stop for a year, helping with reparations, dealing with a serious summer flood, as well as handling their usual calls: Highway accidents, house fires and other emergencies.

In November, almost exactly six months after the fire, Sustainable Resource Development Minister Frank Oberle announced that government investigators had ruled out everything but arson as the cause of the fire. The file was turned over to RCMP.

Police have released few details about the case. But residents say there has been an intense investigation going on inside the community, and several people have taken lie detector tests. No charges have been laid.

“It casts doubt over ever other fire we ever had that couldn’t really be explained,” Coutts says. “For us, they could be out there. They could be waiting. They could say, ‘Oh, the fifteenth, that’s a good idea. I’ll light another one.’ I don’t know. In the mind of somebody sick like that, you don’t know what happens. It’s a terrifying thought, and that’s what I think of. That’s why I don’t sleep so well.”

The firehall recently got 18 new pieces of equipment, and firefighters are learning how to use them, arming themselves for whatever this year’s fire season holds.

“The fearful part when you’re the fire chief and when you’re those firefighters out there, is that a lot of our years start the same way last year did,” Coutts says. “They gave us more equipment and they gave us more training and we got some more people, but if the stars all align again, and Mother Nature decides to give us another beating, are we ready?

“You worry, are you going to be fast enough? Are you going to be strong enough? Are you going to be smart enough?”

Pillay-Kinnee remembers driving though Slave Lake immediately after the fire, her town still burning and smouldering, seeing for the first time the same shocking and eerie images that would be flashed across TVs and websites and printed in newspapers around the world. It was an almost unbelievable scene. Entire neighbourhoods reduced to ashes and ruins by a fire so hot it created its own weather system.

One man described it as looking “like the end of the world.”

But Pillay-Kinnee says the death of helicopter pilot Jean-Luc Deba, who came from Montreal to help fight the wildfires and died after crashing into the lake, remains her darkest moment, her worst day. She has spoken to Deba’s wife and daughters, and hopes to one day to visit his grave. A memorial to Deba will be unveiled along the shores of Slave Lake on May 20, the anniversary of his death.

Pillay-Kinnee says his death reminds her of how much worse it could have been.

“We didn’t lose any of our residents in the fire,” she says. “It’s really a miracle. It took my breath away when I saw what we lost, but I never doubted, ever, our spirit to rebuild.”

The mayor estimates 10 to 20 per cent of the families who lost their homes have moved ­away, but Slave Lake has always been a transient community, and Pillay-Kinnee says new families are coming in.

SL Ford Sales owner Doug Babiy, whose dealership became one of the fire’s most iconic images with its line of burnt-out vehicles, says it’s important not to look back at what Slave Lake was before and compare it with what the town is now.

Babiy lost 48 trucks and SUVs, one car, and 30 trailers in the fire. The trucks and SUVs burned so hot that aluminum hub caps melted and formed a molten river through the car lot. The husks of those vehicles have long since been hauled away, replaced by a line of shiny new trucks, glinting in the sun on a warm May afternoon.

The Yamaha dealership that was next door is now an empty lot, and Babiy says he doesn’t know whether the owner will rebuild. His neighbour on the other side, a real estate office, is also gone, and will be replaced by new rental housing units.

“You have to think of this as a whole new community,” Babiy says. “You can’t even think of it as the same place.”

Slave Lake has changed, and the people have changed, too.

Relationships are different. Some people have grown apart, others are far closer. The community’s strengths and fissures have shifted.

Everyone knows, now, how quickly the wind can shift, how fast the unimaginable can become real. They know what can be lost, and what can’t be replaced.

“If I hear that there’s even the threat of a forest fire within 100 kilometres of Slave Lake this season, I’m going to be packing everything I can,” Yolande Klyne says.

Doug Babiy keeps a golf ball-sized chunk of burned wood in his office at the Ford dealership, one of the burning embers that fell flaming from the sky and set his town on fire.

“I keep that to remind me of how lucky we are,” he says. “I see that and I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that there’s anything left at all.”

Many in Slave Lake have hailed Coutts and the other firefighters as heroes who made the split-second decisions that prevented further devastation, even while their own homes, or the homes of their friends and relatives, burned. Other people are still angry, blaming firefighters for not doing more.

Coutts tries not to think about all that. He has his own feelings to contend with.

“I used to walk pretty tall,” he says. “We won more than we lost, and we saved a lot of lives. Now, 30 or 40 per cent of your town burns down, maybe I don’t walk as tall as I used to. There’s some people I still have a hard time meeting their gaze.”

Coutts says he knows without doubt the firefighters did the best they could, but he can’t help but wonder what could have been different.

“I think you could always do better, you could always work harder, you could always have saved one more house if you made a different decision,” he says. “We probably couldn’t have changed the outcome much, but one more house would have been one more house.”

But there’s no time to look back. There is still so much to do, so much to rebuild. Coutts hasn’t slept more than three hours a night since the fire, and he will sleep even less this month.

He says he may feel better when everything that burned has been replaced, when everybody is back in their homes, when the people of his community finally feel safe.

But May 15 is not only the anniversary of the fire, it is also the height of wildfire season. And the smell of smoke is once again drifting on the warm spring wind.

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